Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/161



OREGON BOUND 1853 151

facility within reach of the people is afforded them to obtain food and to find employment. There is a great deal of in- dustry in the valley, and the strangest mixture of economy and liberality I ever saw. With the evidences of friendliness, frankness and generosity a man every where meets, he can hardly believe the community to be composed of people from every part of the Union, a year ago all strangers to one an- other. Land here is good but not as good as that of Wis- consin generally. It is too gravelly. Much of it, especially that most effected by drouth, is quite naked. Generally it is about half covered with a short thick growth of very rich bunch grass that seems to spread some by grazing and may in places eventually form a close turf. A very little of the land on the streams, has grass that may be mown but the best of it is not what your farmers would call tolerable wild meadow On the southern slopes of the mountains grass, much of it clover, takes the place of timber, while the northern slopes are covered with pine, (mainly pitch pine) fir and yellow cedar the latter differing a little from your white cedar, and ap- proaching the famous red-wood, palo colerado, of Oregon and California. Much of the southern slopes, is grown up to a short stinted wild stage Freemont's artimesia a form of which covers "the plains" from Scott's Bluffs, below Laramie, to the Sierra Nevadas fit for neither fuel nor food for man or beast. There is soil everywhere. The rock is very seldom exposed. Now and then you see a wall of sand stone or hornblende running along the mountain side, but you see too that time is fast employed whittling them to earth.

The periodical drouth produces a necessity for irrigation on almost all soils, for the coarser products. Wheat, oats and barley all cereal grains do well. They mature before they suffer. Flax is indigenous on all good soils from the Bear river to the Pacific. There is no three months of dog days to make corn. The summer nights are too cool for it and the drouth a little too early. The early kinds are grown but with no great success. With wheat we can beat the world